"The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography."
-- Oscar Wilde

Thursday, August 8, 2013

On a Chinese Screen, by William Somerset Maugham (1922)

We have made little secret here at The Jade Sphinx of our love for writer William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965). Maugham was a great literary artist and a
rare one – often his books are related in first-person narration, but the
point-of-view is seldom intrusive or misleading. Maugham had the gift of being everywhere and
nowhere; equally at home in a native hut in Burma as at a London society
party. Having earned a medical degree
but never practicing medicine, Maugham cast a cold, clinical eye on human
behavior, and mercilessly robbed us of our pretentions and affectations. His is a voice that is missed.

Maugham’s biography makes that of overly macho writers
like Hemmingway pale by comparison: world traveler, espionage agent,
playwright, art collector, literary stylist.
Maugham travelled long enough and far enough to make Indiana Jones
envious, and he used his wide experience as the basis of several of his most
successful novels, including The Razor’s
Edge (1944) and The Moon and
Sixpence (1919). For those who long
for a world that is still exotic, or yearn for places before they were spoiled
by fast-food chains and American consumer culture, a diet of Maugham is just
what the doctor ordered.

In the winter of 1919, Maugham travelled 1,500 miles up
the Yangtze River. While on the road,
Maugham noted down acute and finely crafted sketches of those he met on
countless scraps of paper, gathering them together for publication in 1922
under the title On a Chinese Screen. These scraps include views of Western
missionaries, army officers and company managers who are culturally out of
their depth in the immensity of the Chinese civilization. With his typical precision, Maugham sheds
light on the most vulnerable parts of their lives.

On a Chinese Screen is, in many ways, the perfect summer
book. There is no through narrative, and
most of the ‘chapters’ run no more than a few paragraphs. It is the perfect book for dipping or
gobbling up – the vignettes that Maugham parades before us are
mesmerizing. Reading more like the rough
notes of never-realized novels or short stories, the scraps in On a Chinese
Screen will resonate in your memory much longer than more sustained and
fully-crafted narratives.

Here, for example, is Maugham (celebrated playwright!) talking
with a Chinese professor who has studied English theater: "Does
it require no more than that to write a play?" he inquired with a shade of
dismay in his tone.

"You want a
certain knack," I allowed, "but no more than to play billiards."

"They lecture
on the technique of the drama in all the important universities of
America," said he.

"The
Americans are an extremely practical people," I answered. "I believe
that Harvard is instituting a chair to instruct grandmothers how to suck
eggs."

"I do not
think I quite understand you."

"If you can't
write a play no one can teach you and if you can it's as easy as falling off a log."

Here his face
expressed a lively perplexity, but I think only because he could not make up his
mind whether this operation came within the province of the professor of
physics or within that of the professor of applied mechanics.

"But if it is
so easy to write a play why do dramatists take so long about it?"

"They didn't,
you know. Lope de la Vega and Shakespeare and a hundred others wrote copiously and
with ease. Some modern playwrights have been perfectly illiterate men and have
found it an almost insuperable difficulty to put two sentences together. A
celebrated English dramatist once showed me a manuscript and I saw that he had
written the question: will you have sugar in your tea, five
times before he could put it in this form. A novelist would starve if he could
not on the whole say what he wanted to without any beating about the
bush."

"You would
not call Ibsen an illiterate man and yet it is well known that he took two
years to write a play."

"It is
obvious that Ibsen found a prodigious difficulty in thinking of a plot. He
racked his brain furiously, month after month, and at last in despair used the
very same that he had used before."

"What do you
mean?" the professor cried, his voice rising to a shrill scream. "I
do not understand you at all."

"Have you not
noticed that Ibsen uses the same plot over and over again? A number of people are
living in a closed and stuffy room, then some one comes (from the mountains or
from over the sea) and flings the window open; everyone gets a cold in the head
and the curtain falls."

Or, better yet, here is Maugham, on a Chinese junk,
thinking about the nature of adventure and romance. This passage, perhaps more than ever, parses
closest to the center of the Maugham persona, and provides a greater
understanding of the sustained sense of living he sought abroad: Then
suddenly I had a feeling that here, facing me, touching me almost, was the
romance I sought. It was a feeling like no other, just as specific as the
thrill of art; but I could not for the life of me tell what it was that had
given me just then that rare emotion.

In the course of
my life I have been often in situations which, had I read of them, would have seemed
to me sufficiently romantic; but it is only in retrospect, comparing them with
my ideas of what was romantic, that I have seen them as at all out of the
ordinary. It is only by an effort of the imagination, making myself as it were
a spectator of myself acting a part, that I have caught anything of the
precious quality in circumstances which in others would have seemed to me instinct
with its fine flower. When I have danced with an actress whose fascination and
whose genius made her the idol of my country, or wandered through the halls of
some great house in which was gathered all that was distinguished by lineage or
intellect that London could show, I have only recognized afterwards that here
perhaps, though in somewhat Ouidaesque a fashion, was romance.

In battle, when,
myself in no great danger, I was able to watch events with a thrill of interest,
I had not the phlegm to assume the part of a spectator. I have sailed through
the night, under the full moon, to a coral island in the Pacific, and then the
beauty and the wonder of the scene gave me a conscious happiness, but only
later the exhilarating sense that romance and I had touched fingers. I heard
the flutter of its wings when once, in the bedroom of a hotel in New York, I
sat round a table with half a dozen others and made plans to restore an ancient
kingdom whose wrongs have for a century inspired the poet and the patriot ; but
my chief feeling was a surprised amusement that through the hazards of war I
found myself engaged in business so foreign to my bent. The authentic thrill of
romance has seized me under circumstances which one would have thought far less
romantic, and I remember that I knew it first one evening when I was playing
cards in a cottage on the coast of Brittany. In the next room an old fisherman
lay dying and the women of the house said that he would go out with the tide.
Without a storm was raging and it seemed fit for the last moments of that aged
warrior of the seas that his going should be accompanied by the wild cries of the
wind as it hurled itself against the shuttered windows. The waves thundered
upon the tortured rocks. I felt a sudden exultation, for I knew that here was
romance.

And now the same
exultation seized me, and once more romance, like a bodily presence, was before
me. But it had come so unexpectedly that I was intrigued. I could not tell
whether it had crept in among the shadows that the lamp threw on the bamboo
matting or whether it was wafted down the river that I saw through the opening of
my cabin. Curious to know what were the elements that made up the ineffable
delight of the moment I went out to the stern of the boat. Alongside were
moored half a dozen junks, going up river, for their masts were erect; and
everything was silent in them. Their crews were long since asleep. The night
was not dark, for though it was cloudy the moon was full, but the river in that
veiled light was ghostly. A vague mist blurred the trees on the further bank.
It was an enchanting sight, but there was in it nothing unaccustomed and what I
sought was not there. I turned away. But when I returned to my bamboo shelter
the magic which had given it so extraordinary a character was gone. Alas, I was
like a man who should tear a butterfly to pieces in order to discover in what
its beauty lay. And yet, as Moses descending from Mount Sinai wore on his face
a brightness from his converse with the God of Israel, my little cabin, my dish
of charcoal, my lamp, even my camp bed, had still about them something of the
thrill which for a moment was mine. I could not see them any more quite indifferently,
because for a moment I had seen them magically.

On a Chinese Screen is available for free download at the
invaluable www.manybooks.net. This is the perfect book with which to
beguile the closing days of summer.

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James Abbott

James Abbott is a California-based writer and arts advocate. His online column The Jade Sphinx (http://thejadesphinx.blogspot.com/) champions the Fine Arts, featuring stories on such concepts as recognizable quality, artistic heritage and tradition, and techniques of the Great Masters.